Admin I Monday, April 08, 2024
BERLIN – A doctor in Berlin was sentenced on Monday to three years in prison for helping a patient end her life.
The Berlin Regional Court ruled the 37-year-old woman he helped to die was unable to make the decision of her own free will because she suffered from depression. The court found the doctor guilty of manslaughter because it was not convinced she was able to make a “completely rational decision.”
The doctor had “exceeded the limits of what was permissible,” said judge Mark Sautter.
The judgment is not final. The 74-year-old doctor announced at the start of the trial that he would appeal in the event of a conviction.
The veterinary student first contacted the doctor at the beginning of June 2021. Just under two weeks later, the doctor provided her with a lethal dose of tablets, but she vomited them up. On July 12, 2021 the doctor then helped give an infusion of a lethal drug in a hotel room.
The judgment noted the woman had started the infusion process herself and died shortly afterwards.
The public prosecutor’s office had urged a prison sentence of three years and nine months, while the defence demanded an acquittal. The doctor stated in court that he had never doubted the woman’s “freedom of judgement and decision.”
He said he had seen in her “great emotional distress and the determination” to commit violent suicide if necessary. During the trial the doctor’s defence lawyer had criticized the lack of legal regulation of assisted suicide in Germany.
The former family doctor belongs to a euthanasia organisation and was acquitted in an earlier trial concerning assisted dying.
That case concerned a woman who suffered from a chronic bowel disease. The ruling in that trial, in March 2018, concluded that the patient’s will should be respected, a judgment that was later confirmed by Germany’s highest court, the Federal Court of Justice (BGH).
